A qualitative study exploring motives for the transition from injecting to smoking drugs in Vancouver, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: People who use unregulated drugs have been transitioning from injecting to smoking drugs. This has occurred in tandem with the shift in the North American drug supply from naturally produced heroin to synthetic fentanyl and other novel adulterants, which is driving the ongoing drug toxicity crisis. In British Columbia, drug smoking is now the primary mode of consumption for drug toxicity deaths. This study explores the shift from injecting to smoking drugs. METHODS: We conducted qualitative interviews with 31 people who smoke unregulated drugs between January and March 2023. Participants were recruited through outreach at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and two prospective cohort studies - the AIDS Care Cohort to Evaluate Exposure to Survival Services (ACCESS) and the Vancouver Drug Users Study (V-DUS). Interviews covered a range of topics including motives for transitioning from injecting to smoking drugs. Data was coded by parent codes and child codes. Thematic analysis was used to identify factors shaping participants' drug consumption practices, and was further guided by the concept of resilience. RESULTS: We found that the shift to drug smoking was a form of resilience - a practice to ensure survival and wellbeing while navigating the unpredictable unregulated drug supply. Participant narratives of drug smoking were related to issues with injection, control over consumption, and ease and discretion of drug smoking. CONCLUSION: Our findings demonstrate that the shift to drug smoking is a form of resilience whereby people who use drugs have altered their drug consumption practices to ensure their survival and wellbeing. These findings highlight the need to reduce punitive drug laws while expanding public health and harm reduction measures for people who smoke unregulated drugs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".